>hi all,
>
>a client of mine wants to have a system of reporting wherein he selects the columns from a list of about 30 fields which are from about 10 different tables. and, only the selected fields should appear in the report print out.
>
>now, based on his selection of fields certain joins etc will have to be done to extract the desired data from the respective tables.
>
>my problem is that in the worst case when he selects all the fields, my SQL statement exceeds the limit of 254 characters (which i am storing in a character variable) how can i store more than 254 caharacters in a memory variable which i then would like to execute through macro expansion ?
>
>alternately, if somene has a better & more viable solution, can you please share it with me ?
>
>with sincere thanks in advance.


Build your statement in an array, then concatenate those into a string and execute with macro expansion.